Siege of Port Hudson

• 1. Introduction

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  The Siege of Port Hudson lasted 48 days, and when it finally ended on the 9th of July 1863, it had been the longest siege in American military history. A Confederate garrison dug into an 80-foot bluff above the Mississippi River held off an army of 30,000 to 40,000 Union troops for nearly seven weeks. They ate mule meat and rats. They melted down spent bullets to make new ones. They tripped attackers with telegraph wire staked only eighteen inches off the ground.

  But Port Hudson was more than a desperate last stand. It was the southern anchor of the Confederacy's grip on the Mississippi River, and losing it meant losing the ability to move salt, cattle, horses, men, and munitions between the eastern and western halves of the South. Two Union attacks failed before the garrison surrendered. When they finally did, it was not because the Union broke through. It was because news arrived that Vicksburg had fallen first.

  How did a small river port with 200 residents and a single broken-down locomotive become a fortress capable of bloodying the Union Army twice? How did black soldiers fighting under fire at Port Hudson change the course of American history? And what did the siege cost the man who ordered it, General Nathaniel Banks, in ways that lasted long after the guns fell silent?

• 2. A River Worth Fighting For

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  From April 1861, both the Union and the Confederacy made the Mississippi River central to their war strategies. The Confederacy needed the river to move supplies; the Union wanted to sever that route and split the South in two. The most critical stretch was the section around the mouth of the Red River, which served as the Confederacy's main artery for shuttling salt, cattle, and horses westward, and men and munitions back east.

  In the spring and early summer of 1862, Union forces pushed along the river from both ends. Flag Officer David G. Farragut fought through Confederate fortifications at the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip and captured New Orleans. A second Union fleet under Charles H. Davis took Memphis after defeating Confederate river forces in the First Battle of Memphis. Left exposed, the South moved quickly to fortify Vicksburg to the north and Port Hudson to the south.

  The idea to fortify Port Hudson came from General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, the Confederacy's foremost expert on fixed defenses. Writing to Major General Mansfield Lovell in March 1862, Beauregard recommended fortifying Port Hudson as a precaution against any Union breakthrough above Memphis. In June of that year, Major General Earl Van Dorn wrote directly to Jefferson Davis: "I want Baton Rouge and Port Hudson." A few days after Baton Rouge fell to the Union, Confederate General John C. Breckinridge led 4,000 men to occupy the site, with troops commanded by General Daniel Ruggles. Soldiers of the 4th Louisiana Infantry arrived on the 15th of August 1862.

• 3. Building the Fortress

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  Port Hudson sat on an 80-foot bluff on the east bank of the Mississippi, 25 miles upriver from Baton Rouge, above a hairpin turn in the river. The surrounding terrain of deep ravines, swamps, and cane brakes created a natural defensive maze. Before the war the place had only a few buildings and a population of 200 people, and it served mainly as a port for shipping cotton and sugar.

  In 1862, a railroad was constructed connecting Port Hudson to the town of Clinton, 19 miles to the northeast. The entire line was only 21 miles long, its track composed of iron strips nailed flat onto rotten ties. The rolling stock amounted to one locomotive, one passenger car, and six freight cars. This single train could move only a few hundred troops at most and could not haul heavy artillery at all. That transportation weakness would haunt the garrison's ability to defend itself.

  Three different layouts for the fortifications were considered. One called for a central fort supported by angled outworks. Another proposed lunettes arranged along a 400-yard line. The third would have been a continuous ring of redoubts and trenches surrounding the entire position, but its eight-mile circumference would have required 35,000 men and 70 artillery pieces to defend, a scale that was simply not feasible. The line of lunettes was chosen, and construction began on seven fronting the river.

  When General Breckinridge was ordered to Kentucky on the 18th of August, he left only 1,500 men to continue the work under Ruggles. Among the first guns mounted was a forty-two-pounder smoothbore cannon, manned by former sailors of the CSS Arkansas, which had been destroyed at the Battle of Baton Rouge that same year.

• 4. Gardner Takes Command

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  Major General Franklin Gardner arrived at Port Hudson on the 27th of December 1862 to take command. A native New Yorker and West Point graduate who finished 17th in his class in 1843, Gardner had commanded a cavalry brigade at Shiloh. He was 39 years old when he took charge of the garrison.

  Gardner moved quickly. He reorganized the defensive lines, concentrating the fields of fire of the heavy guns, and speeded construction by substituting packed earth and sod for the traditional gabions and sandbags. Finding himself short of engineering expertise, he promoted Private Henry Glinder, formerly of the United States Coast Survey, to first lieutenant of engineers. He also improved supply and storage operations, built protected roads within the fortifications to move troops rapidly to threatened points, and raised garrison morale through visible energy and merit-based promotions.

  While Gardner strengthened his position, the Union commander General Banks lingered in New Orleans reorganizing administration and civil government. Colonel Sidney A. Bean captured the contrast in his diary: under Butler, Bean wrote, "much was accomplished with small means. Now nothing is accomplished with great means." Rear Admiral David G. Farragut grew so frustrated with Banks's inertia that by March 1863 he prepared to run his fleet past Port Hudson without any Army support at all.

  Farragut assembled his attack force by the 13th of March 1863. It consisted of four principal warships including the steam paddle frigate Mississippi and three gunboats. For the night passage, he had gun decks whitewashed to improve visibility, anchor chains lashed to the ships' sides as improvised armor, and mortar boats positioned for support.

• 5. The Night the River Turned

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  At 11:20 pm on the 14th of March 1863, Confederate lookouts spotted Farragut's approaching fleet and fired a warning rocket. Seconds later an eight-inch smoothbore shell from Battery 9 struck the gunboat Albatross, opening the battle. The Confederates had over twenty cannon covering the river in eleven batteries, including nine of heavy coastal artillery. Battery Number Seven was prepared with heated shot, especially destructive against wooden warships.

  Farragut commanded from his flagship Hartford. The first six vessels were lashed in pairs; the steam paddle frigate Mississippi brought up the rear alone. As the fleet advanced, the cannon fire produced thick white clouds of black-powder smoke, mingling with smoke from pine-wood illumination fires the Confederates had lit to light up the river. Hartford and Albatross ran aground under the Confederate batteries and remained stuck for ten minutes, yet both passed the last Confederate gun by 12:15 am and were out of range by 12:45 am.

  The ships that followed were not so fortunate. A 6.4-inch conical shot smashed through Richmond's boiler safety valves, filling the ship with escaping steam and cutting power to her engines; Genesee, lashed alongside, lacked the power to fight the current alone, and both drifted back downriver. Monongahela and Kineo also ran aground on the western shore. The stress of backing off disabled Monongahela's engine; a thirty-two-pounder split Kineo's rudder post and disabled her steering.

  Mississippi, last in line, ran aground and was riddled with shot, shell, and hot shot. Her captain ordered her abandoned when fire threatened the magazine. At 5:05 am she exploded in a blast seen in New Orleans, nearly 80 miles downriver. The garrison of Port Hudson had repelled the entire Union fleet. Confederate casualties were three enlisted men killed and twenty-two officers and men wounded; the Union fleet lost seventy-eight killed or missing and thirty-five wounded.

• 6. The Assaults That Failed

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  By the 22nd of May 1863, Banks's forces, which had grown from 30,000 to as many as 40,000 men during the operation, had encircled Port Hudson. Banks wanted a quick assault to free his army to go help Grant at Vicksburg. Gardner's garrison numbered roughly 7,500 troops, a four-to-one disadvantage.

  For the first infantry assault on the 27th of May, Banks organized four attack groups but gave no specific start time, ordering commanders to begin "at the earliest hour practicable." The result was a disjointed attack. Generals Weitzel and Grover struck from the north at dawn; Generals Augur and Sherman attacked from the east at noon. Union troops advancing through forested ravines ran into a deadly crossfire between a fortified ridge called the "bull pen," a lunette nicknamed "Fort Desperate," and an artillery battery on "Commissary Hill." Premature shell bursts from the 1st Maine Battery added to the Union toll.

  Brigadier General William Dwight then committed the 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guards to the attack at 10 am. These troops, who had been working as pioneers on a pontoon bridge, were in the worst position of any unit in the assault. They advanced along Telegraph Road with a fortified ridge to their left, Confederate heavy artillery to their front, and the Mississippi River on their right. Captain Andre Cailloux, a free black citizen of New Orleans, led them forward giving orders in English and French until he was killed by artillery fire. The Guards were forced to retreat to avoid annihilation, but their advance was widely covered in northern newspapers.

  The afternoon attacks under Sherman on the eastern face also failed, despite his troops carrying axes, poles, planks, and fascines to fill in the dry moat fronting the Confederate works. Confederate Colonel William R. Miles had even collected rifles from the hospital to give each of his soldiers three weapons. Few Union attackers made it within 70 yards of the Confederate line. Union casualties for the day were 293 killed, 1,545 wounded, and 157 missing; Confederate losses totaled 235.

  A second assault began at 3:30 am on the 14th of June 1863, launched after only an hour of bombardment and with no agreed-upon attack plan. A heavy fog further disordered the attack. The result was even more one-sided: 1,792 Union casualties against 47 Confederate. Division commander Brigadier General Halbert E. Paine led the main assault and was wounded, losing a leg. Captain James F. Fitts of the 114th New York, writing afterward in The Galaxy magazine, described the ditch before the Confederate works as filled with "the living and the dead," soldiers striving within six yards of Confederate rifle muzzles to climb the earthwork face, "continually dropping back, with bullet holes perforated clear through their bodies."

• 7. Endurance and Surrender

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  After the second assault failed, Banks turned to formal siege operations under a new chief engineer, Captain John C. Palfrey. Palfrey focused on three Confederate bastions: Fort Desperate, the Priest Cap (Confederate batteries 14 and 15), and the Citadel, which Union troops nicknamed "the Devil's Elbow." Rather than infantry charges, this meant sapping, the slow construction of zigzag approach trenches, fortified batteries, and raised sharpshooter positions called trench cavaliers that allowed riflemen to fire down into the Confederate works.

  Underground, Union forces dug three mines beneath the Confederate lines, two aimed at the Priest Cap and one under the Citadel, each to be loaded with powder and detonated to blow gaps in the trench works before a final infantry rush. On the 26th of June a general bombardment from Union batteries and the fleet disabled most remaining Confederate artillery. The Confederates countered where they could: they used the locomotive from the defunct Clinton railroad to power millstones to grind cornmeal, salvaged and recast spent ammunition, and stretched telegraph wire eighteen inches above the ground in front of threatened positions to trip attacking infantry. On the 26th of June the 16th Arkansas Infantry raided a Union sap near the Priest Cap, taking seven prisoners. On the 2nd of July a raid torched the Union supply center at Springfield Landing.

  None of it could offset what disease and starvation were doing inside the fortifications. The garrison suffered from scurvy, dysentery, and malaria. Soldiers who deserted told Union forces the garrison's true condition. Colonel Steedman recorded that many Louisiana troops had deserted to the enemy, "giving him information of our real condition." When Gardner learned on the 4th of July that Vicksburg had surrendered, he recognized that further resistance served no purpose. On the 9th of July 1863, the Confederates laid down their weapons. Captain Thornton A. Jenkins accepted the surrender, as Admiral Farragut was in New Orleans.

  The terms Banks offered were lenient. Enlisted men were paroled to their homes. Seriously sick and wounded were placed under Union medical care. A total of 5,935 men and civilian employees were officially paroled. The 405 officers who were not paroled were sent to Memphis and New Orleans; roughly half eventually ended up at Johnson's Island prison camp in Ohio.

• 8. What the Siege Left Behind

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  The fall of Port Hudson, combined with the fall of Vicksburg five days earlier, gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River and cut communications and trade between the eastern and western Confederacy. The cost on the Union side was between 4,700 and 5,200 battle casualties, with another 4,000 felled by disease or sunstroke. Gardner's garrison suffered around 900 casualties from combat and illness combined.

  The performance of the Louisiana Native Guards at Port Hudson reverberated far beyond Louisiana. On the 11th of June 1863, an editorial in the New York Times addressed their conduct at the 27th of May assault directly: "They were comparatively raw troops, and were yet subjected to the most awful ordeal... The men, white or black, who will not flinch from that, will flinch from nothing." Captain Robert F. Wilkinson wrote home that "the theory of negro inefficiency is, I am very thankful at last thoroughly exploded by facts." General Banks included praise in his official report. These assessments supported abolitionist efforts to recruit free blacks across the northeast; by the end of the war, nearly 200,000 black men had served in Union forces.

  For Banks personally, the siege was a political catastrophe. Had he taken Port Hudson quickly in May, he would have outranked Grant and might have claimed the glory of the Vicksburg campaign. Instead, Grant took those victories and, eventually, the presidency that Banks had coveted. Banks spent the remainder of the war pursuing cotton deals and political arrangements in Louisiana, including an expedition into eastern Texas called the Red River Campaign, justified in part by his estimate that Union sympathizers and vast stores of cotton awaited along the Red River.

  Among the small number of veterans later awarded the Medal of Honor for actions at Port Hudson was Francis E. Warren of the 49th Massachusetts, who went on to become governor of Wyoming.